Happy Secularism Day!

It’s otherwise known as Reformation Day, but I believe in calling a spade a spade, as long as I don’t get done for commiting a hate crime.

On 31 October, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

Thereby Europe stepped into the antechamber of secularism, for the Reformation pushed the countdown button for it. I may go into the doctrinal and theological reasons for that tomorrow, but today I’ll just ask a simple question:

Why did the Reformation become so successful at that particular time, early in the century when even translating the Bible into vernacular was a capital offence?

After all, that wasn’t the only attempt at church reform. The Englishman John Wycliff and the Czech John Hus before Luther, along with the Fleming Cornelius Jansen (or rather his followers) immediately after him, also tried to correct the iniquities that so excited the sixteenth-century Protestants.

Yet their efforts neither destroyed the traditional church nor created a new one. Whatever their original intent, those reformers achieved just that: some reform, not much.

Conversely, first Luther and then Calvin succeeded in breaking away from the Catholic church altogether, starting worldwide confessions of their own. In many areas of dogma, liturgy, everyday practices and the whole tenor of religion, these confessions veered as far away from orthodox Christianity as was possible while still remaining Christian.

Yet, though the original animus of the Protestants was directed at dogma, liturgy and clerical abuses, their success had little to do with correcting any of those. At the risk of sounding materialist, one has to conclude that the contributing factors were almost all secular.

The Holy Roman Empire was a feudal network of principalities, mostly though not exclusively Germanic, acting as vassalages to the supreme feudal lord, the Emperor. Some of the potentates were desperate to assert their independence from the papacy, sensing correctly that the Emperor’s power would diminish if denied its ecclesiastical underpinnings.

The most effective way of breaking away from the Pope would have been to break away from Catholicism altogether. However, by that time the only alternative to it, the Eastern confession, had become no alternative at all.

Thus, when Luther came up with his sweeping reforms, his audience was primed, and the seeds of his dissent fell on fertile soil already softened up by Renaissance humanism.

The feudal aristocrats of the Holy Roman Empire didn’t take long to realise that what was under way was the birth of a new religion, not just a reform of the old one. A new religion meant a new political arrangement, this much they knew.

And, following two centuries of humanist scepticism, that was probably all they needed to know. Their secular aspirations came first. Fine points of theology and liturgy were strictly secondary.

However, the power of the feudal aristocracy was being curbed not only by the Pope but also by the emergence of the bourgeoisie, a new, mostly urban, class.

The economic, and consequently political, power of that class derived neither from inheritance nor from arable land. Mostly the bourgeois relied on labour, their own or hired, to get ahead. Their economic success was measured not in acres but in money – the more of it, the better. This put them on a collision course with the Catholic church.

First, though the church’s opposition to usury had by then weakened, it had by no means disappeared. Even if some secular authorities had made the charging of interest legal, the general attitude of the church was that of half-hearted toleration, barely masking the tacit disapproval underneath.

Yet credit was the bloodline of the urban middle classes, since without it they couldn’t take advantage of the business opportunities arising in the rapidly growing towns. Hence the bourgeoisie of the Holy Roman Empire felt uncomfortable with the Catholic church.

Nor were they happy with the Jewish domination of financial services that would inevitably ensue if Christians were banned, or at best discouraged, from lending money at interest.

Whatever latent anti-Semitism the bourgeois possessed to begin with became more virulent because they felt that their own church was pushing them into the hands of the Jewish money lenders. That resentment was described in English literature, both approvingly (by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice) and disapprovingly (by Scott in Ivanhoe).

It wasn’t only the growing middle classes but also many of the aristocrats who were often indebted to the Jews, and those gentlemen were conditioned to solve financial problems by violence. After all, their original fortunes had been made that way.

This was the nature of many anti-Jewish massacres, including the 1190 pogrom in York (the last such event to take place in England), where the mob led by local noblemen first broke into the Minster to destroy the promissory notes kept there, and only then went after the Jews. That bile could also partly account for the anti-Semitism of both Luther and Calvin who were aware of its appeal to their flock.

The difficulty of obtaining credit wasn’t the sole problem the urban middle classes had with the church. Their wealth depended on hard work – not only around the clock but also around the calendar. Yet both the clock and the calendar were affected by the traditional practices of the church: it wasn’t just the Sabbath day that was supposed to be kept holy.

The ‘days of obligation’ set aside for religious worship numbered at least 100 in many dioceses, which meant that almost a third of the year was to be taken out of wealth-generating toil. This paled by comparison to the 200 such days demanded by the Eastern church at its most orthodox, but that was little consolation for the aspiring Germans.

Upwardly mobile classes are innately opposed to any traditional hierarchies, and this held true for the Germanic bourgeois of the sixteenth century. That’s not to say they were intuitively egalitarian, far from it. It’s just that, for their aspirations to be pursued unimpeded, they needed to replace the old hierarchy of status derived from birth with the new hierarchy of status derived from money.

To that end, throughout the Middle Ages the emerging class of urban bourgeoisie had been fighting for political independence from the aristocracy. Municipal government and other local institutions had been wrenching bits of sovereignty away from feudal noblemen, including ecclesiastical ones.

The wealthier the bourgeoisie became, the more political power it could wield – and the more prepared it would be to break away from the church. Yet, pious as most of the townsmen were, they weren’t quite ready to part ways with their faith even if they had problems with their church. And in those days they tended to use the words ‘faith’ and ‘church’ almost interchangeably.

When the reformers came along, the bourgeois heaved a sigh of relief. They no longer had to be good Catholics in order to be good Christians: “Every man is his own priest,” declared Luther. Thus it stands to reason that they welcomed with open arms the original reformer, Luther, and especially Calvin who reformed the Reformation by pushing it even closer to the middle class.

Luther stayed within the confines of the German principalities, and his survival was largely owed to his appeal to the secular aspirations of the German princes, however carefully they tried to mask such aspirations with pious verbiage. That’s why, 19 years before Tyndale was immolated for merely translating the Bible, those princes shielded Luther from papal wrath.

I realise to my shame that I’ve been waxing materialist throughout this short sketch. The fault isn’t so much mine as my subject’s, but I still must atone for it. So, barring a nuclear attack in the next 24 hours, I’ll try to decorticate Protestant theology tomorrow – showing, with luck, that it too pushed Europe closer to secularism.